We are Suffering from a Wisdom Famine in the West

THE MEANING CRISIS

“With the Enlightenment and the move to a secular world, we lost a religious worldview that homed us and gave us access to wisdom,” Vervaeke observes. “We have tried to replace that worldview with political structures and socioeconomic structures that are supposed to do the same thing. In modernity, politics is basically ideological competition. [...]. So, the rise of secularism and the secular state with its sociopolitical discourse and ideological competition has accelerated our disconnectedness in a profound way.”

Connectedness gives us meaning, and is the core of wisdom. “Wisdom doesn't just mean having discernment,” he explains. “It means dealing with the things that cut us off from connectedness, which is ultimately the meaning in life.”

THE WISDOM TRADITIONS

“A worldview is two things simultaneously: (1) a model of the world and (2) a model for acting in that world. It turns the individual into an agent who acts, and it turns the world into an arena in which those actions make sense.” The congruence between “agent” and “arena” leads to meaning in life.

A worldview has the capacity to configure meaning, to make sense, in both small and significant ways: “a man cuts some flowers and carries them to his dwelling. He gives the flowers to the woman who dwells there with him. [Within] their worldview, an otherwise rudimentary act becomes the prism for a transfiguration that deepens the nature of their relation to one another. With the giving of the flowers, many significations take place: the man is transformed into the lover, she into the beloved, their dwelling into a home, and the flowers into a celebration.”

“The worldview is the cultural analogue of an ecology,” the two write. “The attunement between the agent and the arena mirrors the Darwinian fittedness between an organism and its ecological niche. A fluid worldview is akin to a healthy and balanced ecology. Just as there is the possibility for an ecological crisis, there is also a possibility for a worldview crisis.”

INFORMATION REPLACES WISDOM

The form of knowledge behind our information society is what Vervaeke calls “propositional knowledge.” This knowledge is based on facts and naming

The problem is that we have lost other forms of knowledge that allow us to experience our connection with ourselves, each other, and the worlds we are embedded in.

“People know where to go to find information. But when we ask, Where do you go for wisdom?, the answer is: I don't know. People grab from here and grab from there in an autodidactic and often fragmentary fashion, which has a tremendous capacity to exacerbate self-deception.”

FORMS OF LOST KNOWLEDGE

The Four E’s: The “central features” of human cognition as embodied, embedded, enacted, extended. Meaning, in short, “the brain and body as an integrated dynamical system as a self-organizing system.” [...]. “a deep continuity between the biology of the body and the cognition of the brain—that the principles and patterns and processes of biology are foundational to cognition.

In addition to the propositional, i.e., fact statements based on observation and rationality, [Vervaeke] points to three other forms of knowledge: procedural perspectival, and participatory.

Procedural knowledge is a skill memory. Procedural knowledge is knowing how to catch a baseball, how to ride a bike, knowing how to do something.

Perspectival knowing is what it's like to be here now: what's foregrounded, what's backgrounded, what's salient, what's relevant?

“That's participatory knowing. The world and I are being shaped to each other biologically, culturally, and cognitively.”

HOW CAN WE BECOME WISE?

Mindfulness, for Vervaeke, is central. In fact, one could say that the mindfulness movement broke the spell of separation, opening us to a space of being beyond mere mental activity. “With mindfulness,” he says, “I can break out of egocentric bias and that will actually afford me overcoming a lot of self-deception and it also enhances my connectedness to the world.” Mindfulness is a “higher order practice” that enables a meta-perspective on one’s self and one’s arena of action. “This is why perspectival knowing and the ability to transform it is so central to the cultivation of wisdom,” he notes.